Beginning in the summer of 1899, a few months after Spain relinquished its colonial possessions in the Americas, Henry made Paris his half-time home, summering on the Continent and wintering in Washington. Though he continued to travel until the First World War, his journeys were now strictly American and European affairs. Even these, however, were not without their attendant pedagogical possibilities. The brief but effectual junket through Normandy in 1895 had reawakened his old academic and aesthetic interest in medieval civilization while offering an attractive counterpoise to the modern capitalist condition. As the century came to a close he continued to revisit the feudal theme and, under the influence of both Coutances’s beauty and Brooks’s doctrine of modern-day decay, made an idol of its obsolescence.
Exhibiting his usual weakness for sweeping cultural statements, Adams kept an eye on the Exposition Universelle held in Paris from mid-April through early November 1900. Attracting an astounding fifty million visitors the Exposition, so one historian has written, “probably was the largest and most ambitious international gathering for any purpose ever.” Eager to be near the action, Henry stayed through the summer in an apartment at 20 Rue de Longchamps near the Trocadéro in the 16th arrondissement, from which he steered guests—including Lizzie and fourteen-year-old Martha Cameron and his former brother-in-law Edward Hooper—through the grand fair. Happily playing the attentive uncle, Adams escorted Martha and two of her companions to luncheon in the Asiatic Russian Pavilion, where they enjoyed a simulated ride along the Trans-Siberian Railway; afterward a brightly lit “Street of Cairo,” complete with a fashionable bazaar and lithesome belly dancers, drew their attention. Adding to the variety, he later shepherded the girls to see the French stage actress Gabrielle Réjane perform in Madame Sans-Gêne, a historical comedy-drama of a plainspoken laundress who becomes a duchess. Other outings yielded only limited temptations. A knowledgeable collector of art, Adams found surprisingly few objects at the Exhibition to garnish his Washington home. “There are no pictures for sale,” he wrote to Gaskell, “no bronzes; no marbles, of a quality worth getting.” To this tart disclaimer Henry made but a single exception, adoring the exquisite tapestries in the Spanish pavilion which he called “by many times the finest ever brought together.”1 Perhaps while enjoying such handsome textiles, he meditated on the stark contrast between Spain’s still vivid artistic sensibility and its recent collapse as a global power.
Surrounded by a sampling of the world’s aesthetic, mechanical, and architectural treasures, Adams lingered about the exhibition halls over weeks and months trying to read their meaning for the modern condition. One wonders if he watched a flickering film, negotiated a newly issued escalator, or took note as Campbell’s Soup received a gold medal (the icon still present on a number of its products and evident in Andy Warhol’s famous artistic appropriation). If he is to be believed, enlightenment suddenly arrived for Henry in the great Gallery of Machines, a large iron, steel, and glass structure built for the earlier 1889 Exposition Universelle. Illuminated by electrical light and housing a variety of engines, dynamos, and transformers, the gallery blazoned the rapid evolution of energy from horsepower to machine power. Entering the hall, Adams immediately sensed that traditional measures of social and economic development were now defunct: “I… go down to the Champ de Mars and sit by the hour over the great dynamos, watching them run as noiselessly and as smoothly as the planets, and asking them—with infinite courtesy—where in Hell they are going. They are marvelous.” Reflecting on the relatively small span of time that distanced the Chicago and Paris expositions, he believed, “In these seven years man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old.”2
Seeking the eye of an expert, Adams recruited the distinguished physicist and founder of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Samuel Pierpont Langley, to serve as his guide in the Gallery. Langley offered a practical assessment of the apparatuses on display and Henry used this information to extrapolate a deeper cultural significance. His observation of the steam-driven dynamo in the Education remains to this day a profound, disquieting, and elegiac articulation of humanity’s Faustian bargain with technology: “As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.… Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.” The human desire for communion with the “infinite” endured, Adams noted, even as traditional faith receded before the onslaught of contemporary science. Placed in historical context, the Gallery of Machines, a vast monument to the world’s most advanced technology, represented an old, indestructible idea housed now in a new electric church.3
As the summer of 1900 progressed, Henry navigated emotionally and intellectually between two worlds. His meditative journey among the dynamos was paired with an intensive study of the influential thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, some of this material soon to make its way into Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Adams’s adventures in Thomism shaped his thinking on the contrast between the medieval and modern worlds, the divergence, as he put it, between the dynamo, the “male,” capital-centric sphere of scientific reason and flux, and the Virgin, the “female,” church-centric field of imagination and tradition. Leaving philosophy (and theology) aside, he took from Aquinas an aesthetic sensitivity evident, he argued, in church architecture, music, and iconography. Compared to St. Thomas’s sublime scholastic authority, “all modern systems,” Adams insisted, “are complex and chaotic, crowded with self-contradictions, anomalies, impracticable functions, and out-worn inheritances.”4 All resembled the apparently confused man reflexively offering a silent invocation before a brute, mute machine.
The Paris Exposition, combined with his Normandy travels and still earlier excursion to Chicago’s World’s Fair, provided Henry with the creative tensions and materials to embark upon his last great writings. These offerings, many scholars have argued, constitute his most lasting literary achievements. Both the Chartres, a selective consideration of feudal France, and the iconic Education advanced their author’s fullest statements on the duality—faith versus reason, temple versus motor—of Western civilization and the supposed long decline of creative inspiration. But before committing the Virgin, “the greatest and most mysterious of all energies,” to paper, he discovered that still more immediate and earthly matters required his attention.5 With America suddenly a growing power and Hay, as secretary of state, nominally at its helm, Adams might well have wondered of his own role as a Washington wise man in a republic leaning precariously toward empire.